Week 2: Osborn Neighborhood Alliance

I’m at the Osborn Neighborhood Alliance, a community-based organization in the Osborn neighborhood in NE Detroit. They are a small group of three full-time staffers, grown from two since their beginning in 2011. Mostly, now, they manage house renovation projects in the neighborhood, flipping vacant homes. They will sell the one they are working on now, called the “Mapleridge St. House”, to a foundation for the amount they injected, $60,000. This raises the values of the surrounding homes from $10,000, sparking some community pride, they point out. The foundation will turn around and rent the house out for two years and then financially transition the renters into ownership.

I was lucky enough to sit in on a meeting this week discussing a grant of $550,000 to transform the whole block of the Mapleridge St. House. The givers of the grant talked about their experience with the cost estimates for renovations being conservative, given unforeseen expenses. ONA responded that they had more than one inspector go through the houses, and took a representative sample of them from the block. Every person I met at this meeting wondered if I was an urban planning student because this was so perfectly suited for one. Regardless, I thought it was fascinating.

My project will use what I began to learn about at the meeting. I’ll be documenting ONA’s process physically developing the neighborhood. I’ll be putting together a handbook for other small community-based organizations looking for guidance in how to look for funding and where to start making visible difference. I’ll also be discussing a little of what caused the current conditions in Osborn and residents’ thoughts about their neighborhood. I’m excited to start interviewing people next week.

I’m feeling more and more comfortable in Detroit. Walking around midtown makes it feel smaller and more understandable, and taking a driving tour of Osborn on Thursday really helped to make it feel smaller, too: not just a hypothetical town that lays outside the office doors, or only the street I see coming and going to the office. Osborn is quite a mixed bag in terms of quality of life. It doesn’t even depend on the block. Within one, there could be landscaped front yards with kids playing in them and burned, crumbling structures. I plan on getting to know Osborn more and more every week, from statistics I find in my research for the handbook and from conversations with residents, and I’m excited to.